Apartments in this building were allocated to Chornobyl first responders and families of those who died due to the disaster. Photo: Tamara Khrushch/Facebook
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Nataliia Khodemchuk, 73, has died in hospital of injuries sustained as a result of Russia’s attack on Kyiv on the night of 13-14 November. Nataliia was the widow of Valerii Khodemchuk, the first victim of the 1986 disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
Source: the national joint 24/7 newscast
Nataliia Khodemchuk
Photo: UrbanNasledie / YouTube
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Details: Nataliia died in a Kyiv hospital, where medics had battled to save her life.
Nataliia’s husband, Valerii Khodemchuk, was the first person to die in the Chornobyl accident in 1986. Journalist Tamara Khrushch said that his body still remains trapped under the ruins of Reactor 4.
After the tragedy, Nataliia moved from the city of Prypiat to Kyiv and lived in the Troieshchyna district.
Nataliia Khodemchuk
Photo: UrbanNasledie / YouTube
Quote from Tamara Khrushch: “On Chornobyl remembrance days, Nataliia would travel with other widows to Mitinskoye Cemetery in Moscow, where the first 30 Chornobyl workers who were fatally exposed to radiation are buried. One year I was there with them; I came back with a television film and, in my heart, the deep grief and pain felt by these people who had lost their loved ones.
Moscow’s celebrated medicine did not save them. I say this not out of anger or the pain stirred up by today’s deadly war, but as a matter of truth. Another group of Chornobyl power engineers who received extremely high doses of radiation recovered and had the good fortune to live on; they were treated in Kyiv by Professor Kindzelskyi.”
Photo: UrbanNasledie / YouTube
More details: In Kyiv, Nataliia lived in a residential building where some of the apartments were allocated to first responders and relatives of those who died as a result of the Chornobyl disaster. Known as “liquidators”, the first responders were civil and military personnel called in to deal with the immediate and long-term aftermath of the nuclear disaster at great personal risk.
Another resident of the building is Oleksii Ananenko, a former Chornobyl mechanical engineer and Hero of Ukraine who was one of the three volunteers who risked their lives to avert a second possible explosion at the plant.
The residential building was hit by a drone during Russia’s large-scale attack on the night of 13-14 November. Nataliia’s apartment was “burnt to the ground”, Khrushch said. Nataliia suffered burns to over 45% of her body and was taken to hospital, where she later died.
Background: Latest reports indicate that seven people were killed in the Russian attack on Kyiv, including Svitlana Vashchenko, a kindergarten teacher.
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